Seeing how seasonal images can capture the circle of life

Visual Arts/Aidan Dunne: Vivienne Dick's Excluded by the Nature of Things is a very good film installation at the Limerick City Gallery of Art. Projected onto three screens arranged in a semi-circle, it unfolds as a procession of beautifully shot seasonal images in a variety of natural settings in Ireland.

Reviewed: Excluded by the Nature of Things, Vivienne Dick; The Wound Dresser, Richard Slade; Post Domestic, Des Farrell at Limerick City Gallery of Art until Jan 10th (061-310633)

This cyclical natural pattern is effectively interspersed with bursts of animation and staged action featuring actors. It is a fairly brief work with great forward momentum and clever use of all three screens, with a constant flow and interplay of images across and between them. The use of three screens is integral to the way the piece is constructed and presented, and not an extraneous element, and it does give the work a nice, enveloping presence.

Credit must go here not only to Dick herself, who was responsible for the camera-work, but also to her editor, Florence Brument, who manages the jigsaw nature of the whole thing brilliantly. What comes across is the play of natural rhythms, our intimate cultural connections with seasonal events and places, and, most notably in a stylised sequence in which a man and woman use the limestone pavement of the Burren as a kind of emotional chessboard, allusions to male-female relationships.

To get a sense of the conceptual underpinning involved, it helps to read Dick's accompanying note. The altarpiece format of the screens evokes ideas of the sacred, but clearly sacredness based more on something pre-Christian, perhaps on nature mysticism. As Dick puts it, "a reclaiming of our divine origins bounds up with the earth, the body, life, peace." Hence the copious references to sacred or otherwise symbolically charged sites in Ireland, including Croagh Patrick, that have ritual associations extending back beyond the introduction of Christianity.

She refers to the writings of the French philosopher Luce Irigaray, who offers a feminist critique of the Western philosophical tradition on the basis that it is the "master discourse" which sidelines and suppresses the feminine and maternal. In a way, Dick's installation is a visual equivalent of Irigaray's attempts to articulate the silenced and ignored domain of feminine subjectivity. She frames an optimistic, even utopian ambition for a renegotiated state of relationships based on "a sexed culture and a female divine".

This might all sound too theory-driven and academic, but Excluded itself is anything but. What strikes you is its visual richness, its musical flow of imagery and - another strength - sound. It would be interesting to see it given further and, inevitably, more expensive installation set-ups, projected, for example, on three purpose made, directly adjoining, floor to ceiling screens. It more than merits the effort and let's hope curators have it in their sights over the coming year.

Richard Slade's The Wound Dresser, also at the City Art Gallery, is a substantial, consistently engaging show of paintings. That said, he is not at all a consciously ingratiating painter. He makes paintings with a deliberate, concentrated intensity, on occasion working the surfaces into thick, clotted, positively awkward accumulations of pigment. An erstwhile figurative, expressionist painter, he is on this evidence much more relaxed about following a picture to its logical and if need be abstract conclusion, appropriating patterns, scraps of collaged vegetation or objects, symbols and whatever else seems appropriate. All pulled together in a highly intuitive, personal way.

Perhaps the allusion to Walt Whitman's poem, with its visceral and tender account of a wound dresser moving along the line of beds, cleaning and bandaging the horrific injuries of wounded and dying soldiers, is intended to stand in some way for the artistic enterprise. If so we can infer a therapeutic function to the artist's imaginative labours.

Slade himself hints at an aspiration to give physical, visual form to levels of experience that go otherwise unrecorded, to "distil" in his paintings the "emotional atmosphere of environments". In the stubborn density of his pictures there is a sense of what might be described as the thickness of experience. He seems to take places, people, moments and events, and slow down his own and hence our perceptions of them with dogged determination. Certain aspects of his work, including this stubborn determination, an indifference to technical facility and pictorial niceties, and his sombre, earthy palette, reminded me of the American painter Terry Winters, not in a directly derivative way, but in terms of a general sympathy of outlook and vision. It is a show that rewards patient attention.

In the City Gallery's third current show, Post Domestic, Des Farrell takes a single, utilitarian object, "a mallet or pestle", and deploys it in a variety of forms and contexts. His aim is partly to de-familiarise the familiar, so that we are prompted to reinterpret something that we think we know. We encounter pestles presented as valuable museological displays, as mass multiples, as whatever we like to read into them ourselves.

There is an obsessive quality to all this, and the work is perhaps partly about obsessiveness, about why it happens that we focus on particular objects to the exclusion of others. Somewhere along the way, though, the law of diminishing returns kicks in, confirming the self-imposed limitations of the project. It is not uninteresting, and very well made and presented, but limited in scope.